Do you use Twitter more to share news and information or to find it?
Clearly more and more people are using it for the latter, and Twitter has responded by improving its search.
The company has pointed out that hopefully we haven’t noticed the upgrade going on over the last few weeks, and that the changes have been made because the size of the job was getting too big for the old system. Read More
Have you ever wondered, you know just for a second or two, just how Google works, how the software behind its search technology that conducts hundreds of simultaneous calculations that require only a fraction of a second? Well wonder no more more. Some algorithmic bright spark created this Google (graphic). Enjoy. Read More
A few weeks ago a rare event happened: Google stopped working. For thousands of UK searchers, the search engine and many related websites went down for a few hours. This prompted me to wonder what a world without Google would be like – so I’m going to find out. So from Thursday, I’m going Google-free.
I’ll be blogging my experiences here, and commenting on Twitter with the tag #lifewithnogoogle.
Google’s announcement earlier this month that it was showing consumers search results as they typed was big news in both the industry and mainstream press. But I’m not convinced brands should be changing their UK search strategies just yet.
What’s the reach of Google Instant?
One fact missed in much of the initial reporting was that not everybody searching at Google UK will see Google Instant results. In fact, most will not. Instant results are currently shown to UK consumers with the latest browser version who are also logged into a Google (often Gmail) Account and search via the Google homepage (not a toolbar, browser box or 3rd party site) . Read More
In an interview with The Telegraph Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, has revealed that the location-based social service is in talks with the major search engines, hoping to strike a deal which will use Foursquare’s check-in information to enrich local search results.
Despite assurances to the contrary by Yahoo! chief Carol Bartz last autumn that it was “done” with job cuts, the search giant has done it again – announced another swathe of redundancies. Read More
Google has launched the public version of its collaborative software Google Wave following a beta trial, but does anyone care? Read More
For a few weeks now, News International have been causing a huge stink in the industry with Rupert Murdoch accusing search engines of stealing his content and threatening to stop his websites from being indexed (something he could do any time he wanted).
And now a senior figure from one of his closest UK rivals has chosen to focus his vitriol on Search Engine Optimisation and in the process managed to insult not just a crucial and growing element of the digital marketing industry but also internet users that search. In other words, almost anyone who uses the web. It all goes to show what a young industry we are all still in and how far so many major players in the offline world have to go before they really ‘get digital’.
Matt Kelly, Associate Editor for Mirror Group Newspapers, died of irony this week when he intensified the recent war of words between traditionally print based media owners trying to make a buck from the web and the search community, by calling on the news business to rely less on traffic from search engines and more on its “unique heritage and values” i.e. journalism. Unfortunately what Matt doesn’t realise is that the real problem is his own content and a lack of understanding that have lead him to hire SEO agencies that give us all a bad name.
In a World Editors Forum keynote in Hyderabad, he said, “In our great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us were all too quick to sacrifice anything that stood in the way of search engine optimisation … so three months ago, we launched two new websites … built on very different platforms designed especially to show each off in their best light. And the hell with SEO. We’re chasing passion, here, not page impressions.”
Matt also spoke of his previous experience with SEO consultants when working on other MGN sites, “We followed the brochure word for word, and we employed the same merry-go-round of SEO consultants to help us build sites that would ping to the top of search engines for a world hungry for our content. If little things like character, brand … the ingrained values that made the print product a success, got in the way, well … the ends justified the means. Content wasn’t king. Traffic was. Whoever, from wherever, reading whatever. It didn’t matter as long as the audience grew.”
Excuse me? They told you that content wasn’t king? Wow. Which search agency did you hire, Matt? Does it get worse?
“But it gets worse … In treating SEO as the be-all and end-all of online publishing, we devalued our content in the mind of the users. What a word: ‘users.’ Not readers, or viewers. Certainly not customers, not unless we are being deeply ironic. For the fact is the word ‘user’ is, for the vast majority of people consuming our products online, entirely accurate. We’d never choose such a sterile word to describe the people who buy our newspapers. But online, ‘users’ is about right … This was the audience we’ve been chasing all that time. A swarm of locusts.”
Excellent PR skills there, Matt. The people that visit your site from search are “locusts”? You won’t use sterile terminology to describe the customers of your print products but you are happy to describe those who come from search to your digital products (remembering that 80% all of internet journeys start with a search, so that’s going to be a huge proportion) as insects that have been known to decimate people’s lives? Charmed I’m sure.
What Matt, Rupert Murdoch and their ilk all fail to grasp is that there is no such thing as a poor user, only poor content. Is it really Google’s fault it drives people to MGN’s sites in droves and those people don’t find enough content that they can’t find elsewhere on the web and which is probably better? Does he not realise that people who visit digital media are known as ‘users’ rather than ‘readers’ because websites should be interactive and therefore is something you use? ‘Readers’ is too passive a term to be accurate.
I honestly don’t know where to begin with all of this. At LBi we have already addressed the poor usability and evidently deliberate “anti-optimisation” of MGN’s 3am.co.uk (as have others) and as for the other site he references, MirrorFootball.co.uk? Well, as a football fan, there’s certainly nothing unique about MGN’s effort. At least nothing, including the archive footage, that I personally would pay for.
SEO is 90% common sense. And content is vital. This is how you get the authoritative links that will boost your ranking. Be informative, funny, interesting, different, entertaining, even- possibly- controversial. BE AUTHORITATIVE. Make your website something that people will want to go to in order to find stuff that interests and/or entertains them. Yes there are poor SEO consultants out there, like the ones Matt has evidently chosen to hire, who may turn your website into a dull experience with bland content and who persuades you to optimise against terms like “music news” (who searches for that?) but ethical SEO consultants know that a site that is good for users is good for search engines. The site should be easily navigable, (a good start is not have URLs that are just as much gobbledygook to humans as to search spiders) and have loads of content that shows the user and the search spider that this is the place to find and interact with whatever it is you are searching for.
Matt’s real problem is that newspapers are old media designed for a mass audience, clumsily trying to make it in a digital world which is designed for the niche. They won’t all disappear completely but many will and those that remain will change radically. The newspapers sites that make it will be, like any website, the ones that have something unique that users won’t find anywhere else. And if you have something really unique and niche enough that you can charge for it then, as Google’s Josh Cohen said this week, “I would argue that if you are putting up a paywall, getting traffic and being discovered is even more important because you have got a smaller set of users who are potentially willing to pay. Discovery is just as important”. Even a mixed strategy of paid and free content may be the compromise solution, but once again, that content had better be unique.
It’s going to be a long hard lesson for the old media dinosaurs and a lot of established media institutions will make more big mistakes in their digital strategy before they learn that the brave new world of the web means that they have to now play by some very different rules.
Just a few days ago we were having a discussion in the office about Bing and its seemingly terminal beta status… Following a bit of a debate regarding the rationale for leaving something in beta in one market whilst you launch in another (in summary: it enables a test-and-rollout approach for both the technology and the marketing and also enables two rounds of PR, one for the beta and one for full launch) we decided that it couldn’t be long until Bing got a full roll-out. In fact the only reason we figured it hadn’t already happened, given that the functionality now appears to almost exactly mirror the US ‘full Bing experience’, was due to Microsoft not wanting to detract from the recent Windows 7 launch.
Well now we’re left wishing we’d all started a lottery syndicate, or at least that I had posted our prediction here first, because Bing just went and launched properly in the UK.
As I approached the usual slot I set aside for writing this blog it seemed like the most important thing for me to comment on this week but now I’m actually putting hands to keyboard I’m questioning the importance of the move. After all the product is no different today than it was yesterday and ’beta’ as a notion seems increasingly irrelevant – Google leave products in beta for years, as evidenced by the ‘feature’ that re-introduces the Beta badge in Gmail just in case you got somewhat attached to its presence during the five years that service remained in beta.
What I thought would be more interesting then would be if I revisited my original thoughts on the subject – back when Bing launched I went through five reasons why Bing still has a long way to go. So, how far have they gone?
1. It was ugly. It still is ugly. Sorry, I still can’t stomach that logo and still think the start images should be full screen.
2. The launch timing was all fumbled. The first few months of less-than-full functionality mean that many people will have tried a less-than-perfect product. It’s not ideal. Now the product is the full version it is important it gets a real marketing push.
3. Google were already catching up. I argued that Google were rapidly catching up with the areas where Bing was supposedly pushing the envelope. Google Options does, to a certain extent, add extra functionality but I’m not sure how many searchers even know of its existence and Squared is very interesting but relatively unknown (and still… you guessed it, in beta).
4. Bing isn’t social. Bing still fails to utilize passport data in any way that benefits users although, to be fair, no-one else seems to be doing much in this area either.
5. They just don’t get the audience. Interestingly all the signs point towards the fact that Bing is no longer targeting the ‘power searcher’. Integration with Ciao and Bing Cashback don’t exactly scream ’savvy searcher’ but at least Bing seem to be going after a more realistic audience now. Perhaps the audience talk was never any more than PR spin.
The latest (and much more significant) news is that Bing (along with Google) will use Twitter to introduce real-time search to their results and that they will be partnering with the computational engine Wolfram Alpha to provide answers to actual questions. More than anything this at least proves Microsoft’s commitment to continuing to push Bing forward – important because almost every other search engine launch feels remarkably static in comparison to Google. It will be interesting to see if Google are working on something of their own to compete with Wolfram…
As we all know, Facebook were the top dog in social networking until Twitter came along and started to steal some of its thunder with the introduction of real time search. So in August, Facebook upped their game with the $50 million purchase of Friend Feed. Many commentators at the time said that the ability of Facebook to improve its real time search offering using Friend Feed’s technology, whilst not the fabled ‘Google killer’ many are waiting for, was something that would really affect the way users look at search and at least would make the boffins in Mountain View do some serious thinking. Do users want ‘algorithm search’ based on how people link to each other like the current model of Google (and, though not executed as well, Bing which also now provides the organic results for Yahoo as well) or a ‘social graph’ based on people’s relationships and conducted in real time like Twitter and Facebook/Friend Feed?
Google know that real time could be the future and the fact that they hadn’t managed to get on top of that was a real concern. Google did launch “Search options” in May, allowing users to filter their search by different types of results (videos, forums, and reviews), by time (recent, past 24 hours, past week, past year), as well as seeing related searches, a “wonder wheel” view, or a timeline view. But that’s not “real time search”, is it?
As Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that month, “Google has done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per second basis… We will do a good job of things now we have these examples.”
And, true to their word, on October 21st there were some big announcements.
At the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, the President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, Qi Lu announced the integration of real time Tweets into Bing. Later, the same day Google’s Marissa Mayer announced the same thing for the market leaders as well as a new Google Labs product called “Social Search”. This is a new feature that allows the user to see results for queries from people in their social network. According to Tech Crunch, it is likely that these updates will only be included if the data is open, which would seem to exclude Facebook but not Twitter (as long as the Twitterer doesn’t lock their Tweets). This could be huge for Twitter in terms of taking their offering to the next level and who knows, this deal may mean that they may actually make some money now, though CEO Evan Williams told the New York Times that “revenue was not the focus of the deals.” Of course, Bing and Google have slightly different algorithms so observing the difference in how they filter useful Tweets for the user will be interesting but it does seem a natural next stage for the search giants to include these updates in their results, just as they currently do for news stories, much to the intransigent chagrin of, for example, Rupert Murdoch or Sly Bailey.
So is this going to drive more people to use Twitter or has their uptake peaked making this just a new way of cluttering up increasingly option heavy search results on Google’s once famously clean pages? Are these Tweets, unfairly dismissed as inane chatter by some, going to improve searchers’ experience or should Google just be concentrating on improving their ever changing algorithm which is the best we have but by no means perfect? Only time will tell but the outcome may dictate the way search evolves in the foreseeable future.
Most commented